Readings

Reading Tim Unwin's Wine and the Vine: Why Vineyards Are Where Politics Put Them

A critical reading of Wine and the Vine (Routledge, 1991), the historical geography that explains the world's wine map by politics, trade and capital.

Tim Unwin's Wine and the Vine: An Historical Geography of Viticulture and the Wine Trade, published by Routledge in 1991, makes one case at book length: politics, trade and capital explain more of the world's wine map than soil and climate do.

Two cases show the difference between the explanations. A world-famous vineyard grew up at the mouth of the Gironde, and nothing comparable at the mouth of the Loire. The vine crossed the Atlantic with the conquistadors, then took three more centuries to succeed in California. A grower accounts for such differences with gravel, fog and degree-days. Unwin accounts for them with empires, monasteries, merchant fleets and capital. The claim is comparative. It does not deny that the physical setting matters; it denies that the physical setting decided the map.

The book and its author

Unwin wrote it as an academic geographer. He was then Reader in Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, and he later contributed to successive editions of the Oxford Companion to Wine. The book is a single-volume survey of some four hundred pages, running from the prehistoric domestication of the vine to the wine industry of the late twentieth century.

Its reception is on the record in two disciplines. John Salt reviewed it in Progress in Human Geography in 1992, and Comparative Studies in Society and History carried a review notice in 1994. Routledge brought out a revised paperback in 1996, and the book was translated into Italian, Spanish and Greek. Thirty-five years after publication it is still the standard historical geography of wine in English. No other English-language book tries to hold the whole story, in every region, inside a single argument.

Symbol and commodity

That argument is set out in the book's framing and carried through every chapter. Wine, for Unwin, is two things at once. It is a symbol, with religious, social and cultural meaning running from the cult of Dionysos through the Eucharist to the modern status bottle. It is also a commodity: an article of trade with hard economic weight for the regions that produce it.

Neither half on its own explains where vineyards took root and prospered. The symbolic meaning created a demand that outlived empires. The commercial value drew in political power and, later, capital. Those two forces decided which regions would supply the demand.

The chapter order shows the method. After an opening survey of themes and a chapter on the material side of viticulture and vinification, the book moves period by period: the origins of viticulture and its "symbols and mysteries"; wine in the Graeco-Roman economy; the early and high Middle Ages; the age of European expansion. Two chapters then state the thesis in their titles, "Capital in the sphere of production" and the nineteenth-century "Crises and expansion". The book closes on the twentieth century, with demarcation systems, corporate integration and the "creation of fashion".

Routledge's own summary names four through-lines. Rome spread the vine. Political factors set the contours of the medieval wine trade. Colonialism carried viticulture around the globe. Transnational corporations have reshaped it in our own time. The decisive actors in this history are institutions, not soils.

Bordeaux as the test case

Readers of this site will recognise the thesis, because Bordeaux is its best single exhibit. Roger Dion had already argued in 1959, for France, that great vineyards are made by markets and politics rather than by geology. Unwin's book is the closest the English-language literature comes to that argument carried to world scale. Dion's evidence was French and his conclusions were about France; Unwin applies the same reasoning to Rome, to the colonial vineyards and to the corporate wine trade.

Each of the book's major themes has a Bordeaux counterpart on this site. The Roman diffusion of viticulture behind the legions' supply lines is the story of Burdigala and the Biturica vine. For the "political factors determining the contours of the medieval wine trade", the sharpest illustration is the privilège des vins, a body of rules that ranked wines by origin for five centuries, long before anyone spoke of terroir.

The nineteenth-century "Crises and expansion" chapter covers the same upheaval that our data-based account of oïdium, phylloxera and mildew follows vine by vine. The restructuring that came out of it brought grafted rootstocks, new plantings in Languedoc and Algeria, and a slide into overproduction. The twentieth century's appellation systems grew from that restructuring.

Breadth

The book's other lasting contribution is its range. Unwin wrote before wine studies became a crowded field, and he brought together literatures that seldom met: classical archaeology, medieval economic history, colonial history and agricultural economics. That synthesis gave later work a common historical frame, from the serious wine atlases to the quantitative wine-economics school.

For a reader who wants one book on which to organise everything else they read about wine history, this is still the one to choose.

Age and limits

Wine and the Vine is thirty-five years old, and the age shows in defined places. Its present day is the late 1980s. The New World export boom was young and China barely figured. English sparkling wine did not exist commercially. Climate change, now the force redrawing the very margins the book maps, is absent.

Two bodies of research came after it. The first is DNA parentage analysis in grape science, which has since rewritten the family trees of the cultivars whose movements the book narrates. The second is the large quantitative datasets of modern wine economics. Unwin tells the economic story in prose and maps, not in numbers, because it predates those series. The 1996 revision changed none of this in substance.

It is also an academic book, and makes no apology for it. The treatment is systematic and referenced, and denser than anything written for the bedside table.

The weight of the evidence should be read for what it is. Wine and the Vine is a synthesis of other scholars' work, from prehistory to the 1980s, and its case is built by accumulation: one period after another in which power and trade, rather than geology, set the pattern. That makes it persuasive as an interpretation. It is not a test. Soil, climate and politics are rarely separable in any single region, and a survey of this scope cannot isolate one cause from the others the way a controlled comparison could.

These limits date the evidence without overturning the argument. The frame still holds: wine as both symbol and commodity, and a wine map that records where power and money went. The particulars need checking against newer work, including the sources and datasets gathered on this site. The question the book trains a reader to ask of any vineyard has not aged. It is not "what grows here?" but "who wanted vines here, and who paid for them?"